3 ways Lean Recruitment can boost your recruitment process

Cuts Poorly Performing Steps

Lean manufacturing is an inventory management strategy that aims to reduce costs and waste during production. This method has been reported to increase productivity by 30-50% when applied. 

Lean recruitment is derived from this concept as a remedy to recruitment practices that turn out to be ineffective and inconsistent. 

To avoid such problems and improve their effectiveness,  the most innovative recruitment departments are implementing solutions that support lean practices and cut out poorly performing steps in the process. When you eliminate non-automated processes, such as manually posting job openings across multiple platforms or assessing candidate language skills yourself, you can save time in posting vacancies and filtering resumes.

Ultimately, lean recruitment is intended to reduce the amount of time spent on the process, from sourcing and screening to interviewing.

While minimizing the time-consuming steps, the recruitment team can focus on the most important aspects of recruitment like interviewing, offer of employment, and onboarding.

Utilize the Right Resources

Human Resources departments today utilize a variety of resources to streamline and speed up the hiring process. The best way to avoid costly mistakes when hiring is to investigate your current hiring process and identify those resources. From people to tools, what resources do you currently utilize? Are they effective? 

In fact, despite a hiring team's desire to include certain people in the interview process, it is important to check that this is necessary and to verify that each interviewer has a clear objective. This will ensure that the contributions from each employee are valid and lead to impartial outcomes.

You might also find that the attractiveness and marketing of some tools can add value to your decision making process, but some could provide inaccurate information, preventing anyone involved in the hiring from making the right decision. For instance, Amazon had developed a recruiting tool to speed up their hiring process. But after investigation, it was found that the tool was biased against women, teaching itself that male candidates were preferable during the recruitment process (Reuters).

While the intention was good (to speed up the process), a biased tool can make you take poor hiring decisions and jeopardize your recruiting funnel. 

Choosing the right resources is the key to help you make informed hiring decisions, to reduce your error rates, and to increase the productivity of your recruitment team.

Collect better data for accurate analysis and optimization

One of the most important assets of HR is data.

Among the most significant are average hiring time, hiring cost, and employee turnover rate. By utilizing these key performance indicators (KPIs), you will be able to identify how, when and where to improve your hiring process.

Ultimately, lean recruitment and related KPIs force recruiters to take a closer look at how they set up and run their processes.

Recruiters may use inefficient sourcing channels to locate top talent, for example. Alternatively, the onboarding process may need further review if there is an increase in the resignation rate of recent employees. .

With the further refinement of your data and analytics, you will be able to identify and improve your KPIs at each step of the hiring process, and adapt your approach with agility. A flexible system, that is one of the main characteristics of a lean recruitment, will ensure the best results.


Do you want to create a sustainable and efficient hiring process in your company? Lean recruitment is a framework that you should consider. Another great resource is the e-book which details the best practices used by the world class recruiters.

With the implementation of solutions that make the hiring process more efficient, recruiters are able to take a more proactive approach, save time, and hire new employees much faster than before.

With the implementation of lean recruitment, you will find that your ability to make the right hires will strengthen, and your company will be better positioned to compete in the talent marketplace.